School of Journalism, Media and Communication

Permanent URI for this collection

https://hdl.handle.net/20.500.11951/249

Browse

Browsing School of Journalism, Media and Communication by Subject "Community Audio Towers"

Now showing 1 - 3 of 3
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Community Audio Towers in Uganda
    (3CMedia, 2016-05) Semujju, Brian
    While community broadcasting has been documented for aiding development in the Global South, communities in Uganda engage in narrowcasting and share information using Community Audio Towers (CATs). This challenges our understanding of communication for development media since CATs employ both the one-way and the two-way approaches to ensure survival. Among the crucial areas of CATs that have not been attended to by academic scrutiny is the issue of how CATs sustain themselves financially. To cover that gap, the CAT processes of information gathering, processing and dissemination, are discussed below. The discussion comes from data collected using 10 key informant interviews to show how CATs, platforms that are economically non-viable, are able to survive in myriad economically-oriented media systems in Uganda. Implications of CATs for local community development are herein highlighted.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Introducing Community Audio Towers as an alternative to community radio in Uganda
    (Journal of Alternative and Community Media, 2016) Semujju, Brian
    Community radio started as an alternative to commercial media. The need for an alternative was clear, with many societal voices unrepresented, indicating the domination of the means of mental production by a few. This article presents two communities in Uganda that use Community Audio Towers (CATs) as an alternative to community radio, and examines why the communities prefer the use of CATs to ‘mainstream’ community radio. Using data collected through observation at two sites in Uganda and 10 key informant interviews from major communication stakeholders, including Uganda’s Minister of Information and Communication Technology, the article presents findings indicating that CATs are self-sustaining, with no NGO influence, and they redefine news to mean local emergencies and occurrences, while having no structures (horizontal/vertical rhetoric) as they are started and run by one community member. The challenges of the new alternative media are also discussed.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    The structure of news in Community Audio Towers
    (Journal of African Media Studies, 2017) Semujju, Brian
    This article draws attention to the current sensational modernist conceptualization of news as conflict and prominence to argue that news among the poor be understood as activities happening in a village. Findings obtained through observation at two Community Audio Towers (CATs), plus ten key informant interviews with Uganda’s CAT stakeholders at community and national levels, suggest that the global media logic, supported by massive media structures that dictate what news is, finds no relevance in critical local news methodologies. Using the Critical theory, this article concludes that the counter-ideological events redefine the concept of news from conflict and prominence obtained through professional news making cultures to whatever information the village members take to the towers.